not so long ago I said I had begged off this messageboard...

and so soon I come back, though for a specific reason.

a LEC apologist has made the claim that a million people have done LEC (I suspect that he has lumped in est and the Forum in with that figure, without knowing it of course, just repeating the information given to him by Landmark) and that just one in a hundred thousand have suffered psychologically.

so...

can anyone point me to information that would dispute the figure of one in a hundred thousand. finding evidence of specific cases upward of ten would, of course, do the trick. thanks in advance.

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Acid Reindeer
a LEC apologist has made the claim that a million people have done LEC (I suspect that he has lumped in est and the Forum in with that figure, without knowing it of course, just repeating the information given to him by Landmark) and that just one in a hundred thousand have suffered psychologically.

Ummmm.... in ever so typical Landmarkian fashion... they will announce some authoritative sounding [i:7c15b9634d] dictum [/i:7c15b9634d] without, in ever so typical Landmarkian fashion, bother to explain what they mean by "just one in a hundred thousand have suffered psychologically".

How do they pretend to determine this number ? [b:7c15b9634d] What defines "suffer psychologically" ? [/b:7c15b9634d] Was any formal study initiated ? What testing methods were used ? How was the sample population located ? Who funded this study ? Were any of its results replicated by an authoritative outside body ? What do they mean by the term "psychological" ? Is this mere conjecture ? What is their model of "suffering" ? How do they account for the not insignificant number of rational people who intensely dislike them ?
Why do they attack their critics with such energy ? If this million person testimony to goodness is true, and their ratio is accurate, then something like 10 people, ten, like 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 people have had a problem... does that seem probable, reasonable ? If only ten, then why is the release form necessary ? What could they possibly fear if their work is beyond reproach ?

If it's one in a hundred thousand out of a million, as Nutrino points out, that means only 10 people have experienced psychological problems as a result of Landmark.

Well, these boards are littered with complaints from people about Landmark - far exceeding 10 people.

Landmark is also the organisation that is most often written about on these boards.

So, even that unscientific and quick look at Landmark shows that this claim is like what most of the organisation is about --> BS!!!

Don't be tricked by the false dichotomy between "people reporting positive outcomes" from Landmark and
"people being damaged psychologically". The reason that Landmark has to sue everyone who shows that their techniques are "cult-like" is that,
in mind control, this is exactly what you get: People rave about how great their transformation is precisely because [i:3bfd697d49]they have been damaged psychologically[/i:3bfd697d49].
So the information to point you to is all the articles from professional psychologists on how being brainwashed is psychologically damaging, even though the person is all smiles.

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Brad69
If it's one in a hundred thousand out of a million, as Nutrino points out, that means only 10 people have experienced psychological problems as a result of Landmark.

right, however I want hard proof in the form of newspaper stories and papers, or he can dismiss any other evidence as merely anecdotal. though I do know of a couple of lawsuits but I don't know that they total ten or more. the older ones he can dismiss as pertaining to est and not to Landmark, I want to make this case air-tight.

so: law suits, papers, newspaper stories, anyone? and by papers, I mean papers that cite numbers, rather than psychological theory, which he can dispute. (with good reason, IMHO. psychological theory comes into the domain of philosophy rather than medicine.)

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Acid Reindeer
or he can dismiss any other evidence as merely anecdotal. though I do know of a couple of lawsuits but I don't know that they total ten or more. the older ones he can dismiss as pertaining to est and not to Landmark, I want to make this case air-tight.

Well, there are a couple of outstanding issues that have to be addressed walking into this inquiry. First of all is the assumed dichotomy of psycholgy and philosophy... which it isn't... my belief, based on my firsthand experience, is that [b:0847c0d0c3] one can be philosophically damaged. [/b:0847c0d0c3] .. a novel idea, but one of some potency as well... a philosophically damaged individual may not present classic psychologic signs of injury, or, more probably those signs will present in a diffused, hard to categorize, elusive way, while the recently internalized beliefs from a newly acquired philosophical system may be having a long term effect on the general well being of that individual...

The paradox here is the more you have absorbed certain Erhardian distinctions as cardinal truths, the most insidious of these is that you create your own reality and you are fully reponsible for your own reality and any refusal to "get" that basic truth is a subversive act of defiance, which they are there to "call you on" ... or bust your racket in Erhardian dialect...[b:0847c0d0c3] the less capable you will be of seeing any of your intellectual or emotional problems originating from anywhere outside yourself... [/b:0847c0d0c3] and the less likely you are to replace in house coaching with outside, non Landmark psychological evaluation... not that I have the greatest respect for the average psychologist, which I definitely do not... but I have a great respect for the minority of excellent psychologists who do know quite well what they are dealing with and just how complicated the process of returning to mental health can be... whether one is leaving an all embracing , highly dysfunctional family system that uses love in a selective, manipulative fashion, or a powerful corporation besotted with its own worldly power, a church one has belonged to all of one's life, an ethnic subculture riven with perverse beliefs, a political party that brooks no dissent, or a wacky LGAT preaching flatulant theories and recreating a distant Buddha figure who has long ascended into the higher realms...

In many of these cases there will be a complex disorientation of affect, cognition, belief, self image, social mileiu, life expectation, networks of family and friends, sense of obligation, self censorship, avoidance or shunning behavior, ritualistic activity, absorbtion is certain vocabularies, patterns of consumption, time management, etc... that is too complex to shoehorn into a typical simplistic DSM-IV category, and probably too mutable as well... further confounded by the fact that many of these "institutional maladies" are closely related to sources of power in our society... one treads lightly when one critiques the effect of large corporate power on the minds of its employees, or strange church-state alliances that have taken root in the evangelical churches, so I think there is a tacit quietude on this subject from the APA and it's bretheren because a frontal discussion will also be perceived as a breaching the wall between personal issues and larger social issues of power, privilege, large scale social control which the mainstream media is loathe, to put it mildly, to openly discuss, and mainsteam psychology is downright freaked about, because it would be asking for psycholgy to risk having itself defined as being radicalized... when in fact it may just be curious and probing...

let's please keep on track. I want to try to find hard documentary evidence. I decided not to argue with him on philosophical grounds, for a variety of reasons.

We are on track. The reason you won't find much you can use in mainstream sources is 1, nobody wants to tangle with a potentially litigious organization, especially nobody in the magazine publishing business, 2. the APA and psycholocial community doesn't have a clear paradigm for dealing with these issues, although many infomed psychologists have their own strong personal opinions, 3, many individuals are unwilling to state things for the record, even though they may have had strongly negative experiences, and 4, the distortions induced by the experience may be, as I said, diffuse, hard even for the victim to clearly articulate, yet act as a pervasive influence in that person's life.... the very existence of the Rick Ross board is a major anomaly in this media age of "offend no one, cover your ass at all times, and forever equivocate" .... consider how few actually contribute anything to these boards we are writing on here, while the number of lurkers who read them must be a significant population of concerned viewers.... for those reasons there is a poverty of documentation, however that poverty of documentation doesn't negate the basic truths of the situation